We're officially beta launched!

Onaswarm collects your content — from weblogs, social networks, photo sharing services, social bookmarking sites, e-mail, and even produced — into a single fully search-indexed and tagged website.

• add your friends to see what they're doing
• join or create a swarm to track your user communities.
• create widgets to place Onaswam content or event event calendars on your own webpage

OK, what does this really mean? Well, it means you can easily import your feeds into Onaswarm and we can mash it up in interesting ways for you. For example:

• you can track what you and your friends are doing (the "onaswarm" user has no posts -- it's actually collecting posts from the site administrators)
• you can make user communities -- called swarms -- and track what many users are doing (i.e. independent of you being friends)
• we're more than tracking postings -- we understand structured data within the postings -- so we can do things like make group calendars

If you want to join Onaswarm, you can do it in three ways:

• everyone on Onaswarm has invites they can use to add more users
• you can request an invite
• if you're media or you know me or have a really cool reason or user group, send me a note and I'll set you up

We've got a lot of neat features, which you can read about on our features and FAQ pages. But in particular:

• we have great feed discovery -- just enter User/Account IDs you typically use and we'll ferret out what we can
• OpenID
• tags everywhere
• make widgets from any page
• structured blogging in an AJAXy interface
• a microblogging widget on every user page
• ...

Coming Tomorrow: news on our iPod Touch giveway.

We've been busy. Real busy.

Sorry about the sudden silence: the result of travel days, post vacation um recovery + a broken Internet connection made things less lively than they should have been!

We're putting ads on all non-paying accounts (and NSF) accounts, in a top banner. As you can see above, we don't pay for our own accounts ;-)

Missed posting yesterday -- sorry, it was a travel day. I'm on vacation right now, but a working one.

I was going to write some more clever things, but a combination of my Internet being down for enough of the day, my daughter discovering and become addicted to the damned penguin, and compiling a list of potential beta testers (plus email address, plus feeds from their blogs, flickr, etc.) has left me, well, fried.

See you tomorrow!

Sorry for the long radio silence; we've been busy trying to get the BlogMatrix Platform in the can, which has included literally hundreds of install-and-test cycles. As we prepped the package, it became evident that one critically important part of the picture was missing: some form of social networking, particularly the ability to arbitrarily form groups, aggregate posts, add "friendships" (though we're not sold on this word), etc.. Fortunately, most of the pieces for this are were around, just a reasonable amount of polishing and testing was needed.

So, hoping for a September grand opening, we're making August "at-least-a-post-a-day" month, we're we'll talk about what we're doing and how it all fits into the structure of an Enterprise 2.0 organization.

I've got a backlog of things I'd like to post about so be prepared for terse posting!

We've enabled mod_deflate on our Apache2 installation. This means that we'll only be sending about 10-20% of the data over the wire for our big fat HTML, JS and CSS files as the data will be GZIP compressed.

If you're considering using Apache2, you must explicitly enable it while building, i.e.:

./configure --enable-mods-shared=most --enable-deflate

Right now, this is what I've added to our config file:

LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/x-javascript text/css

There's probably more mods coming to this yet though. 

We've done a ton of editing this morning, making the way our URIs appear to be a little more sensible:

• In "www" space, All admin commands (formerly under "/user") are now under "/admin"
• In "user" space (i.e. individual accounts), all admin accounts are under "/:admin". The ":" is there to differentiate the URI from the "admin" tag (more on this soon).

Unlike V8, we're not going to put an editing menu in the sidebar. Instead, you'll just click on the "My Account" link up there at the top and it will bring you to a page that has all the links you nee -- like this:

In case you're wondering, the icons you're seeing here are called Silk and can be previewed here. We'll work out a better attribution page once we've got the v10 look and feel a little more stable.

There's also a super cool set of countries of the world icons from the same team. We don't have a user for these yet but I'm probably going to invent one just because.

If you've checked in here in the last couple of days, you'll have noticed a fairly unstable site. Sorry about that! We're busy upgrading to the V10 look and feel, which we've just received from our pals at Epiculture. 

On the plus side, V10 rocks. You're (probably) seeing the Blue version of the look & feel. We've also got Orange and Green versions, and once we get things nicely stabilized, we'll add a few more (which users can select from).

The "onamine" logo you're seeing at the top is for a different project -- we're just using that as a placeholder until we get our new logo straightened out.

Hi there,

I'm David Janes, long time blogger and founder of BlogMatrix: welcome to the new "semantic" BlogMatrix blog. I'm using this blog to test out the latest version of the BlogMatrix platform -- "GEN2" as we're calling it internally, post about interesting trends and events in the bloging and technology world and to explain a bit about what we're doing and how we're doing it.

So, welcome aboard and if you have any issues or things you'd like to see changed or added, put a note in the comments.